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Unity 3 Feature Video – Occlusion Culling with Umbra

After much anticipation we finally have the Occlusion Culling video ready!

Senior QA Specialist Samantha Kalman and the Demo Team have put together a quick introduction of how easy it is to set up your games to use Occlusion Culling in Unity 3.0. We first introduced our own Occlusion Culling system in Unity iPhone 1.0 because we felt it to be an important feature for getting the most out of the platform. We have now stepped it up by seamlessly integrating the leading industry standard Umbra Occlusion Culling technology into Unity and making it available across all platforms that Unity supports.

@Mr. – that is not entirely true as you can buy Unity Pro and then iPhone and Android Basic for an additional $800 ($400 a piece and they can be bought separately). Android Basic is not available yet, but it will be for the final release.

You’re right Koblavi.
Unity has the most useful features, a great community and a superb assets pipeline. Neither Shiva nor Torque can compete with Unity 3. Really I love Unity.
But we talking about $4500 if you want create serious games for multiply devices. That is the most expensive Engine in its category.
I can afford Unity pro. But to unlock the needed iPhone- and Android compiler I have too pay extra $3000 And since Unity is supposed to be a indie engine I think that is too much. I mean that are just additional features for the pro version which are already build in and not completely different engines.

To every one that is naggin about all of the free/pro 1500,4500 deal, Unity is not santa clause, it’s a business!!! on the contrary, I think you guys should be thankful that after all their investment in third party stuff such as occlusion culling, deffered rendering, lightmapping and tons of other new features, they are not charging extra for pro/iphone licensing, they are giving a sweet deal to pre-purchasers and a free andriod for as part of the android license package… come on, please be reasonable people, what more could you want?

That said, it’s ok to settle for cheap, slow game engines with limited scripting functionaity, outdated rendering technology and a tiny dev community. Or go for almost everything you get in unity on highend, high cost engines…

I would like to create some proper games for iPhone and Android devices. But I can’t spent $4500 for the whole stuff.
If you would sell the Unity Engine with iPhone and Android support for $1500, I would buy it instantly. And I’m sure a lot others too.
Otherwise I will wait for the Shiva3d1.9 with native OSX support. Simply I can’t effort so much money. I’m not EA.

This looks Great !! But I’m not sure How I would set this up in a streaming world where large parts of the world are not available depending on the position of the player. For example our current title is so large we have to load it in sections in the Unity editor. So I’m not sure how that would affect occlusion set up.

What about a terrain that can be edited by a player in run time, will you be able to set that up too, or do the terrain have to be static to work? For example if the player can use a shovel on the ground to dig holes.

@Robbson: Work within your constraints. Tons of great projects have been finished and shipped with Unity without relying on occlusion culling. If you make a side scroller or top down game you don’t need occlusion culling since the view frustum culling takes care of everything for you. Or, keep your poly count low and take advantage of batching to create a high performance game despite no occlusion culling. If you’re truly interested in learning and getting things done, you don’t need to make something that depends on this “nice to have” feature.

My only real complaint of the current Unity3D version is (rendering) speed. That’s the reason why my so funny learning progress of the engine stopped all of a sudden. It always blocked my imagination if you already know, the engine can’t handle it. Free Ogre3D plus some useful libraries could handle it easily (on a desktop) but it’s much more difficult to use.

So Unity requires a speed fix from the beginning. But now this very important enhancement (to boost it to a speed level of engines from years ago) is only available in the Pro version? Well, it’s maybe affordable and you get a lot off cool things for that price… but when it comes to games I’m just a hobby programmer. I have no public releases in mind but I would like to learn all the features, start some private projects or just get something done. How I’m supposed to do this if I don’t know how much speed penalty I get by not having the occlusion culling?
I think the UDK license model is far more advanced than this… but Epic’s engine is not so easy to use… Damn, I get a pain in my head. After waiting ages for Unity 3 this is really frustrating.

@DaveB: I guess the goal here was to show extraordinarily large scene (with tons of separate objects on purpose). You can see that draw call count is above 30000 indeed without occlusion culling, and goes to 3000 with occlusion culling. This is still on a high side, but it does show that you can get 10x less objects drawn.

Oh, and this was on a Mac; it’s hard to get “monster machines” with that (especially GPU wise)… ;)

@Jack Freeman:
1. A lot of hardware we support doesn’t have hardware occlusion query (Low end PC’s, iPhone, Android, PS3)
Those are the platform that need occlusion culling the most.
2. There are no rendering artificats coming from hardware occlusion being fetched from last frame or pipeline stalls in other techniques
3. The runtime overhead is almost zero

Why do people want technologies that Unity has to license for free? The reality is if you want a free game engine it will have limited capabilities. You always get what you pay for (except the free Unity3D is worth WAY more than nothing).

Its total bullshit this is Pro-only. I mean it doesnt even say anywhere in the title or description that this is pro-only. Furthermore iPhone basic users that currently have access to occlusion culling are going to lose in the “Upgrade”. How can losing such an important feature be an “upgrade”? Seriously people. This is a PRO ONLY video so please state it otherwise its basically false advertising.

Great feature, but excluding such a vital feature for performance from the non-pro version doesnt really make this version an upgrade from 1.7 as much as a downgrade. Swapping it for the infinitely less important feature of integrated lightmapping seems an unmeasured decision indeed. Apart from my own concerns as a hobbyist, what I fear for Unity as a brand is that since every non-pro apps that are released to the app store by hobbyists displays the unity watermark, unity is risking ending up being associated with games running at low fps or with very scaled off graphics. Hardly an appropriate way of marketing a brand.

Come up !
You have got to stop this!
No way, I do not believe it.
The joy in using Unity is certainly to feel at the heart of New 3D technology
even for intermediate user like me.
This is truly unbelievable.
Way to go!

Unity 3.0 uses something completely different. This is a new product Umbra is working on that is currently only available in Unity. It is a completely precomputed solution and really the only solution that will work properly on the wide range of devices Unity deploys to.

Let me remind you guys that there are two versions of the Umbra Occlusion technology. There is the “older” version of it and also the “newer” version called “Umbra Occlusion Booster” which gives better performance and is more optimized.

Now,considering Unity 3.0,which version of the Umbra technology does Unity 3.0 use ? The “newer” version or the “older” version ?